Psalm 16.

This psalm was the last Scripture read by Hugh M'Kail, the evening before his execution in the Grassmarket of Edinburgh. After reading it he said to his father, and those about him: 'If there were anything in this world sadly and unwillingly to be left, it were the reading of the Scriptures. I said "I shall not see the Lord, even the Lord, in the land of the living." But this needs not make us sad; for, where we go, the Lamb is the book of Scripture, and the light of that city, and, where he is, there is life,-even the river of the water of life, and living springs.'

He was a young man of fervid poetic nature, with much ability and culture, was educated at the University of Edinburgh and in Holland, and was licensed to preach at the time of the treacherous overturn of the constitution of the Church of Scotland by Charles II., Middleton, and Sharp. His last sermon in the High Church of Edinburgh was preached while 400 Presbyterian ministers were being driven from their churches, September 8, 1662. Speaking of the persecutions of the Church, he said: 'She had suffered from an Ahab on the throne, a Haman in the State, and a Judas in the Church;' which last was taken to himself by Sharp, for whose part in his trial, see M'Crie's Notes to the Life of Veitch. The torture of the boot, and his weak state of health, seemed likely

to end his days before he came to the scaffold, and he wrote these lines :

:

'Vitæ ergo innumeris curarum erroribus actæ
Clausula consimilis perbreve finit iter,
Distrahor ambigui dubio discrimine fati;
Æger enim jaceo; sin revalesco, cado,'-

which may be freely rendered

'To right, to left, where'er I turn mine ear,
My parting knell, on either side, I hear;
My deepening sickness leads me to death's gates,
And for returning health the scaffold waits.'

No painter has chosen this for his subject like the 'Last Evening of the Girondists;' and yet it is surely as interesting to see a young man, in the first bloom of youth, inditing an epigram with the scholarship that had descended from George Buchanan, and rising to the joy that comes from a higher source. It is the more necessary to advert to this view of Hugh M'Kail's character, because he is the chief figure in a picture of the Covenanters, given by Sir Walter Scott, who, unfortunately, with all his generous sympathy, was unfitted partly by taste, and more by education, for appreciating this side of Scottish history.

As in all deeply tender natures, Hugh M'Kail had his vein of humour. Being asked, on one occasion, how his tortured leg was, he replied, 'The fear of my neck maketh me forget my leg;' and then, reverting to the lamentations of some of the women, he said,

'that though in years he was young, and but in the budding of his ministry, yet he was not to be mourned, for one drop of his blood, through the grace of God, might make more hearts contrite than many years' sermons might have done.' And so, indeed, it

came to pass.

Psalm 17.

'But as for me, I thine own face

In righteousness will see;

And with thy likeness, when I wake,
I satisfied shall be.'

Alexander Hume of Hume closed his life by singing this verse before being executed at Edinburgh in 1682. His death was one of the most cruel judicial murders of the time, and was resolved on to strike terror into men of position and property, who might be inclined to the popular cause. He was known to be attached to the Presbyterian interest, and attended some of the proscribed meetings. His wife, Isabel Hume, appealed on the day of his execution to Lady Perth, and begged her to interpose for her husband's life, and for the sake of her five young children. She was rudely repulsed, his estate was forfeited, and his wife and children exposed to great privation till the Revolution. A fine paper drawn up by him, just before his death, is given by Wodrow, iii. 418.

This Earl of Perth suppressed an influential petition in favour of Hume. When James became king,

Perth declared himself a Roman Catholic, was created a duke, adhered faithfully to his royal master's cause, and retired with him to France, where he ended his days, and had his body deposited in the Scots College, beside James' heart; till another Revolution, wilder than that which banished them, cast forth their relics, 'no marble tells us whither.' Only the Epitaph remains in which James is described as wise and pious like David, William is Absalom, and Carstares and the rest are Achitophels. The son of this Perth, also called Duke, came over with the Chevalier in 1715, and so harried the districts of Strathearn and Strathallan that his name still lives in local rhyme,'O Marshal Duke of Perth !

You're the plague of all the earth—
You breed hunger and great dearth
Where you go.'

This is far enough away from good Alexander Hume, and his death-song on the scaffold, and we may return to it by saying that his descendants still hold their place in Berwickshire.

Psalm 18.

This psalm is connected, at an early period, with the history of France, in a way which illustrates the spirit of the time. The practice of divination which once employed the writings of Virgil for reading the fates of the future, changed to the Psalter, when David

C

took his place above the Sibyl. Clovis, the founder of the French monarchy, whose name in the form of Louis has descended to so many kings, was marching southward from Paris, A.D. 507, to meet the formidable Visigoths in battle. Anxious to forecast the result, he sent messengers to consult the shrine of St. Martin of Tours, the oracle of Gaul. They were told to mark the words of the psalm chanted, when they entered the church. These were vers. 39, 40, and encouraged Clovis to the step which proved decisive in French history:

I have wounded them that they were not able to rise; they are fallen under my feet.

For thou hast girded me with strength unto the battle; thou hast subdued under me those that rose up against me.'

For a very different purpose, and to point the way to a nobler victory, the words from vers. 17-19 were sung upon the scaffold by four sons of the Huguenots, many centuries afterwards:

'He delivered me from my strong enemy, and from them which hated me: for they were too strong for me. 'They prevented me in the day of my calamity: but the Lord was my stay.

'He brought me forth also into a large place; he delivered me because he delighted in me.'

They were sung by the last martyrs of the desert, Francis Rochette, and three brothers of the name of Grenier, who suffered as late as 1762, under the reign of Louis XV. Rochette was executed first, and exhorted